Hi I'm Ben Marriott. I make weekly motion design and animation tutorials and this
week I'm going to show you how I animated this Jon Snow character portrait.
okay we're gonna be focusing mainly on this first scene here
In motion design, you're gonna come across a lot of situations where the script or
storyboard requires you to stay on a character for an extended period of time
without them really doing much so I'm gonna show you all of my animation
tricks for keeping a scene interesting when it's just a character not doing
anything at all I've drawn this in Illustrator and I've separated each
element that I want to animate individually
now that we've imported that file into After Effects
let's take a few minutes to color, label and pre-comp
some of our elements so it's easier to handle
okay now it's nice and organized
let's decide what elements were gonna animate we're gonna animate the snow
falling in the background we're gonna animate the shine reflecting off his
sunglasses we're gonna have his hair waving in the wind we're gonna have his
head moving up and down subtly having his eyebrows raised as well his cheeks
puffing up his lips puckering his sword moving maybe a tiny bit and I know Jon
would never have long claw on his back but without it he just looks like a
Ringo Starr and we're also gonna animate a green shading into this as well as
seen in my previous tutorial all right let's animate us snowflakes let's get
rid of the snowflakes all layer so we've just got this one element to work
with let's have the first position of our snow off the screen up here like this
like a keyframe there and let's mark its final position down somewhere below the
bottom of the screen here now this looks a little bit too fast
let's move this keyframe over let's make some additional points in this path by
just moving our snowflake
you smooth those out let's grab our
convert to vertex tool from up here and just add some anchor points to make that nice and smooth
let's add some rotation keyframes to that
alright I think that actually needs to be a little bit slower as well so I'm just gonna select all of
these keyframes hold alt on my keyboard and drag out this last keyframe it'll
keep the proportion that we've already established
alright that's looking much better now we just need to duplicate that a few more times and offset them so they
all fall at a nice pace
there we are the snow is done it gets a little sparse towards the end here but
we're probably not gonna use the very end of this comp anyway now the shine on
the sunglasses let's create a new rectangle with no fill and let's bump up
the stroke so it matches their reflection here and now let's rotate
this so it matches the angle that we want and I'm going to adjust the
rectangle path here so it matches the distance between our glasses that we've
got here and let's place it just to the left wear glasses here
I'm gonna keyframe that first position and about two seconds in let's drag this to
the right great now let's easy ease those keyframes with f9
alright that's much too slow let's drag this keyframe to make it faster
all right that's pretty good we should also rename this layer -- shine
and let's add this set matte effect so it's only visible behind the glasses and
we want to select to take the matte from glasses right first of all and you want
to make sure the layer you're taking the map from has continuously rasterize on
here I might just go ahead and turn that on for all the layers actually so I
don't run into trouble later let's drag that under our eyebrows layer we've
still got the shine from our illustrator file on this glasses layer so let's add
a fill effect to hide that and select purple let's copy that effect onto our
glasses left as well and let's put this shine onto our left glass as well by
duplicating it over here and then changing the matte to glasses left
there we go got our reflection happening now let's do is hair waving in the wind I'm
gonna make some new shapes to get this effect right so I'm gonna take his
existing hair strands and just blow the transparency so I can use them as guides
now I'm going to create an old elongated sort of teardrop shape
now let's pre-comp this hair strand
now when I drag the anchor point up to the
root here to make it easier for rotating and scaling so let's rotate this and
position and scale it where one of our guide hair is going to be it's actually
dragged it off so it's a bit more visible when we add our waving effect
and to do that we're going to add the wave effect which you can find
in here wave warp and let's change the direction perpendicular to the way our
direction is pointing now let's tweak the wave width and height till we get
something we're happy with
okay that's looking pretty close but the root of our
hair isn't staying still it's wiggling all over the place but we can stop that
by pinning the top edge here so now if we play back you'll see that area stay
still now let's drag that back and see how it looks in context
now let's tweak some of these things a little more to get what we want
okay I think that's pretty close
now let's go ahead and do that for all our other hair strands
okay now that we've done that I can kind of see it looks a little too under
watery and perfect this sort of wave to me here the moment so one thing that
might alleviate that is adding a rotation keyframe to each strand of hair
as well so let's go and do that
okay I think that helps our first strand here
look a little more chaotic let's do the same thing to our other hair compositions
there we go. hair done
now let's get our head moving the first thing to do we
animate our head is to select all the elements that relate to the head that
are attached to the hair like the nose and the lips and the hair and we just
want to make sure those parented to the head before we move it so if you select
them all and then select your pick whip on any of them and just hover over the
head they'll all be parented to the head and
you can do that even with the head selected now if we move our head all the
other pieces are gonna move with it now let's move our anchor point in our
head using anchor point move tool here and just drag that to around the where
we think then would connect now let's animate the rotation
we want to be pretty subtle here so I reckon that should be enough and let's animate the
position just very slightly too
there we are so he's just raising his head a little bit
now let's do the same thing to our eyebrows by animating the position and
the rotation property
Now I've got this animation happening I think that our shine from our sunglasses
should happen midway through this head movement so let's go and adjust that
and let's do the same thing with the cheeks as well
and our puckering lips we can animate those using the scale property if we hold down s, and we want to unlink
our proportions here so we unclick this because we want to make our lips wider
and then narrower when you do this you should be very careful because it can look
weird and stretched and warp like you see here if you push it too far we
really don't want to break the designs we've established here so let's start at
may be sort of 110 percent keeping that and then go to 90 percent 10 percent
either way you should be able to get away with
all right I think that looks pretty good
now let's animate longclaw up here
I think we're just gonna animate his rotation in position so let's move his
anchor point down here toward the sword would be attached which it wouldn't be
attached but if it was that's where it would be attached that's all of the
position and rotation so as his head comes up maybe the sword sort of comes down
attached and rotates this way as if he's sort of looking up and his body's kind of shifting
there we are
looking at it now I definitely think we need some animation
in the body especially with the first section of his coat here so let's just
animate the position and rotation of those as well
all right I've animated those two little first sections now let's animate the shape of his main
body here so the straps I'm gonna animate the position
that's good I kind of like them coming inwards as if he's sort of taking a breath out and sort of
pulling his code around him as he does that now if we've laid down pretty much all
of the animation keyframes that we're gonna need to use the next step is to
add that animated grain texture which is really going to bring life and shading
to the piece but before we do that I really want to make sure that I'm really
happy with the majority of how the animation is looking because it's gonna
be just a little bit more difficult to adjust once our textures are added so this
is the point where you want to send it to your client for review and make sure
that generally the animation has been approved that is if you can and
sometimes you you can't always can so I'm going to go through do one more pass
of every feature and just make sure I'm happy with the easing and the amount
they're rotating and stuff like that okay let's get stuck in
I'm pretty happy with how it is now but I've noticed that the snowflakes are
falling slowly down vertically but Jon Snow's hair is being brushed to
the side pretty aggressively so the wind isn't you know making sense for both of
these objects so we could try to pre-comp these snow layers and maybe rotate them
a little bit and maybe up the speed but I gave that a go and it didn't quite
look right so the best thing to do here is just start again. so I'm gonna delete all
these snowflake layers and do the same thing we did before but moving from left
to right and having less of this sort of gentle wave
there you go I think that's much better and was actually a lot quicker than doing it the first time
alright onto texturing now we're gonna add our animated grain and this is gonna be
the same method that I used in one of my previous tutorials method two in that
video without going into the details of the other video I made a looping texture
using a grain brush in Photoshop now to apply our grain we're gonna take our
grain pre-comp dragged into this comp let's say we're applying that to our
head I'm gonna place this above our head layer let's change the color with the
fill effect and that's just eyedropper this darker flesh color here and we're
gonna apply set matte like we did earlier and we're gonna make sure that this
layer is continually rasterized as well and choose head and we also would have
parented to our head as well so now as we play through it parented and
texturing our head and if we don't want it to affect our ear over here which happens
to be on the same layer is the head we need to select our pen tool and click
around and create a mask there we go
so let's do that for every single one of these layers
all right we've added all of our grain layers and I'm pretty happy with the result
now it doesn't take quite as long as you'd
think I already had this style frame made up with an early design so I kind of
knew where I wanted the grain to be and what color I wanted it to be I think in
total is about 36 layers of green shading here and it took me about 30 to
40 minutes to add all of them I'd say this is a lot more Green layers and I
would typically do in in an animation and with 36 extra layers they can look a
little more crowded but if you shy all those layers it's not that difficult to
deal with really so if you need to edit anything it shouldn't be too much trouble
now let's take a quick look at that second scene of the animation
all right now here's our second scene completed now I applied the same process
from our first scene this one is much easier because there was barely any
animation we've got our snowboard just bobbing up and down with some position
keyframes and slightly will blend left to right and for these trees in the
background I've done the same thing that we did for our snowflakes got a position
keyframe taking it from off-screen left up diagonally to off-screen right and I've
duplicated that a bunch of times that you can see here for the trees in the
front I've made them larger and they're going a little bit faster so there's a
bit of parallax happening there and I've done the same and some lumps of
snow in the background as well and that's pretty much for the animation on
the scene now let's go to a composition with all of these scenes together
and take a look at the final effects that we're going to apply alright so
this is a top composition with the last scenes inside it I'm gonna end scene as
well that's just some simple text one thing we have added here is we've added
a slight push in with our scale property their main scenes are actually 1400
pixels wide and this top one is 1080 by 1080 so that means we can push in to
about 77% without getting any loss of resolution here so I've just got a
slight push in on this first scene to make more dramatic and then a quick pull
out into this second snowboarding scene here as well and that just adds a nice
extra bit of movement to scenes that don't really have much animation going on
now the next factor we've got is pretty subtle so let's zoom in and what I've
done here is that, so I'll turn this layer on you can see
the edges of this kind of bleeding in slightly now what I've done is I've
duplicated that comp set a gash and blur 25 pixels and set the blending modes of
pin light which just sort of means the edges of these areas will have these
this little glow especially when the light area meets a
dark area it's very subtle here but you'll see it a bit more with the other
effects that we've got the next effect we've got is on an adjustment layer and it
is a gradient round if we turn that layer on you can see it adds this kind
of haze and is slight grey to our animation here and that's using the
blending mode overlay and opacity of 50% we've racked that all the way up to
the top and so this is normal you can see what the slate looks like normally
let's undo those and you can actually experiment on the fly using these color
Pickers up here so if you select one of the colors it'll update on the fly you
say you want to try you know a bluer light coming from the top left or you
maybe want to try something you know warmer it's very easy to play around and
find something you happy with and this gradient ramp accentuates that kind of
blooming effect that we had from our other pin light layer here this next
adjustment layer has some of my classic effects that I always go to it's got a
turbulent displace and a post-race time the tabular display it's just Ruffins up
the edges of everything really and it makes these little bumps so it just
looks a little more a little more organic I guess and I use posterize time
to make this look like it was animated in 12 frames per second so
without the posterize time it kind of looks a little sort of smoother and you
can see every frame every second with the posterize time on there it kind of
looks like it's it has a lower frame rate but it makes it look like it's more
traditionally hand animated and with the 12 frames per second frame rate it kind
of looks like it has a bit more of a hand animated look to it which I kind of
enjoyed most at the time now the last two effects are these
texture layers the last two effects are these texture layers and I use these all
the time if we go and have a look it's just this piece of paper painted black
that I rotate and loop a few times I set that to screen and that just adds
these sort of white speculative grain and grit noises to the whole thing which
I love and it also got one down below here that is set to multiply and that one
has sort of these more darker sort of purple speckles that I've got colored
here I'm using video co-pilots color vibrance plug-in to isolate the lighter
areas of that texture and I've just color the purple because I don't want
them to be black or too dark or muddy that you might catch is using a
multiplier effect and that plugins free praise beads Video Copilot now here's
the full animation with all these effects and this is definitely and this
is definitely one of the dumbest things I've ever animated if you use any of the
techniques of processes you've learned in this video please share them and tag
me at Ben_ Marriott_ on Instagram so I can share them in my
stories I'll be showing a new Jon Snow pun every week the Game of Thrones
season finale is running and trust me this is not the worst one not by far
please let me know in the comments what tutorials you'd like to see next in this
channel don't forget to subscribe hit that Bell icon share and absolutely
decimate that like button I'll see you next week